There aren't many people who would ask for a 3:30 a.m. wake-up call so they could get to a casino at 4 a.m. to witness its final operating hours and get its last timestamped piece of memorabilia.

But to Millsboro resident Gerald Birl, somebody had to be crazy enough to do it. And in the early hours of Tuesday, Sept. 16, he was that person at the Trump Plaza casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, waiting to print out a gaming voucher with a timestamp as close to the 6 a.m. closing time as possible.

He even won a few bucks in the meantime, he said.

But that's not all he won. He was able to print a voucher with a 5:59:54 a.m. timestamp as his way to help document the shifting tides in Atlantic City gambling history.

It's a sad part of history, he said, but it's still history, so in his mind, it must be documented.

"It went from 13 casinos and $5.2 billion of business about six or eight years ago, now they're down to $2.5 billion," he said, crediting the rise of casinos being built outside of Atlantic City. "They're reshuffling and it's all part of the deal."

Buy Photo

Included in casino memorabilia collector Gerald Birl of Millsboro’s collection is a book documenting roulette chips in Atlantic City, New Jersey.(Photo: Staff photo by Jon Bleiweis)

Becoming a collector

Birl's foray into the hobby started in 1992. After taking part in some table games at Caesar's in Atlantic City, he took a break and strolled the boardwalk. He entered a shopping mall and passed through several stores when he came across a wall full of casino chips.

Inside the store, he spoke with the man behind the counter, and 10 minutes later, he signed up for the Casino Chip and Gaming Token Collectors Club. Two years later, he helped form the Atlantic City chapter of the group, serving many positions over the years, and now is the chapter's historian.

The club is a nonprofit organization whose purpose is to help preserve gambling history. There are about 300 members in the chapter and about 2,000 nationwide, Birl said. The organization runs the Museum of Gambling History and ChipGuide.com, a social website for collectors.

In the 22 years he's been a collector, he's made many friends along the way from all across the country. It's the best part of the hobby, he said.

"It's like a little fraternity kind of deal," he said. "If you're a collector, one of the bigger parts is the socialization. It's a shared experience."

Over the years, he's collected thousands of chips, slot cards, and miscellaneous memorabilia, such as coin cups, ashtrays and decks of cards. Some he's acquired through his travels, others through trades.

"This is the beauty of the hobby," he said. "You can put as much money into it as you want or you can put as little money into it as you want."

As he flipped through a small binder filled with nine pages of 12 chips apiece — a fraction of his chip collection — he was able to detail the story behind each individual chip.

A green chip with "PPR" engraved on it was from the now closed Performance Poker Room in Dagsboro, when the state allowed poker rooms before casinos could host poker tables. A red chip that reads "CONOCO" is an advertising chip, which he found at an antique shop in Texas. In another box, he had porcelain gaming tokens from present day Thailand that date back to the 1700s.

"It's been in the fabric of the country and the whole world forever," he said. "Going back thousands of years, we've been gambling."

Birl searches far and wide to find casinos and add to his collection. Since he retired in 2001, instead of flying to Las Vegas each year for the Casino Chip and Gaming Token Collectors Club's national convention in Las Vegas, where he's a regular attendee, he has driven the cross-country trek.

Each time, he'll change the route so he can stop at as many new casinos as he can — sometimes as many as 200 casinos on a given trip — before he arrives at his destination. If he went through Michigan one time, he'll go through Mississippi the next time. He has plenty of options — the only two states that don't have gambling, in some form, are Utah and Hawaii.

He'll continue to zigzag through the nation to find something new as long as he can. After all, with each trip comes the potential for a new story to be told, one chip at a time.

"What makes me do it is I'm going to do it as long as I can because there will be a time when I can't do it and that'll be the end of it," he said. "As long as I can do it, I'm going to get in the car and go do it."